The luminance peak in the center is by design - that's clear in its parabolic gradient. Whether this is desirable or not depends on your use case. On this poin

The luminance peak in the center is by design - that's clear in its parabolic gradient. Whether this is desirable or not depends on your use case. On this point I don't see Turbo is being a do it all colormap. In the depth comparison images I still see Inferno and Viridis being superior and personally have no confusion between which spheres line up with which rings. Turbo in fact confuses me on this by introducing the false 2D color gradient. Where I see Turbo being useful, as others have pointed out, is for heatmaps. I personally find Inferno's low end contrast being problematic and usually resort to Spectral for picking out details. If you can live with the fact that the lightest part of the chair in the test image is rendered darkly in Turbo (compare with Inferno), then Turbo is great for purely picking out detail (and taking brightness with a pinch of salt). In the end, it depends on your usecase. Use a linear colormap when appropriate and vice versa.